


God of Beauty

by amberwing



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 08:48:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberwing/pseuds/amberwing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of vignettes on a Surana warden and his companions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [acidaran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidaran/gifts).



He cultivated stillness when he was young.  The Tower was still.  Trees were, too.  If he could be just like those pillars, unchanging, unwavering, perhaps the others’ eyes would glide right over him as they did the stone of the Circle’s walls.

Jowan was the only one who didn’t call him Tranquil.  He saw past Misha’s cultivated silence, and toppled him over with a smile and a wink, a proffered piece of Sabbath’s sweet cake.  In the beginning, that was almost worse.  What was there to gain from being kind?  This was just another trick.  This was another loss waiting to happen, whether it is Misha’s own trust backfiring or some other tragedy lurking in the distance.

He was right, of course.  But the young are never wise.  He remembers Jowan’s ink-stained fingertips trying to follow Misha’s notes on alchemical theory, and the whispers of the apprentices at other tables: _Jowan’s buggering the Tranquil now?  His arse made of marble, or what?_

He went still, went stone, became the _vhenadahl_ until he could see through those human boys.  He still does, sometimes, let his eyes lose their focus until the world becomes just a blur of silhouettes and their beating hearts.  They no longer matter when they are just a body, powered by the same age-old blood and frailty.

Jowan’s hand left ink, blacker than Misha’s skin, as he reached across the table to touch his wrist. “Hey,” the boy said, his mouth quirked.  More ink was swiped across his chin, giving him a premature beard. “I can’t read your script here.  Is that “spindleweed” or a really convincing impression of Irving’s mustache?”

He did not smile.  He did not for a very long time.  But he did sway, as branches in a breeze.


	2. Chapter 2

The leather is soft.  Leliana keeps her fingers just as fine, her skin turned golden from sun and her bow wax.  The sky pale silk is dotted with robin’s egg beads, shell and glass, that wink in the light.  Zevran watches him as Misha turns the shoes in his hands, exploring buttery sole, cool material, and the little ruffled ribbon on the toe.  There’s a smile like a loose bowstring on his lips.  There is dark Antivan leather on his feet.

“Simple, silly things,” he says when Misha looks at him, a shrug rolling his shoulders. “But we find importance in the smallest of objects, no?”

Leliana’s eyes brighten and stay burning when the shoes light upon her smooth fingers.  It’s been a wet week; the ground is a mess of churned mud.  She presses a feathery kiss to both of his cheeks and the shoes disappear into her pack.  _For later_ , she says. _It will be like being back in Val Royeaux._

There are cracks in everyone’s boots.  The mud creeps in and covers them all, head to toe.  As Misha sits down beside the fire, Alistair pours a small waterfall from his sock, his expression one of the deepest despair.  Leliana does not wear the shoes.  She holds them like a talisman as the night grows darker.


	3. Chapter 3

The Qun is so far from the Chant that at first, Misha doesn’t quite know how to even approach it.  Sten doesn’t seem the monster that such a heathen _should_ be, not as the Sisters in Lothering had described him whilst he still hung in his cage.  He is huge, granted.  But so is Alistair, on a height scale.  Put the two beside one another and Alistair looks like a sapling next to a full-grown oak, spindly despite every bit of armor strapped over his freckled arms.

Misha listens to Sten’s prayers and doesn’t understand.  The words are harsh, but they _flow_ , and Misha lets his eyes slide close.  In darkness he can feel the lullaby of them uncoiling over Sten’s lips, rough as homespun, careful as lace.

It’s always hard getting information out of Sten.  When Misha asks – about the Qun, about Seheron – the Qunari’s mouth always thins.  Very occasionally he will explain, but only in the smallest of words.  The Common speech is a bundle of twigs out of his mouth, all clattering against one another.  This word, Sten explains, the one that takes shape like the spray of blood from someone cut in the throat, means _attachment_.

Attachment is not encouraged in the Qun.  _Love_ does not exist.  What is is.  What isn’t is not.  Every bond is mutable and accepted as such. Misha tries to grasp the world in such exact building blocks, not seated upon a foundation of the Maker’s wishes but upon mortal will and logic.  He tries to imagine a world without the ability to search for something better, and contentment with that.

The Tower was like that.  Misha could have been _content_ with the Tower’s life, with a rigid path laid out before him, tread by countless others exactly his like.  Happiness was not a necessity for a good, if not inspired, life.  The Maker provides for those who trust in Him.  In this way, perhaps, the Chant is too much like the Qun.

Misha could have lived that way, then, when the Tower was all he knew.

He doesn’t know if he could now. 

Still, Sten doesn’t chase Misha away at night.  He sits quietly and speaks the Qun, and sometimes, as Misha greets the dawn with the first few stanzas of the Chant, he will stay.


	4. Chapter 4

Zevran has beautiful hands.  He doesn’t seem to mind Misha’s fascination with them, as they lie together in the musty dark of the tent.  There’s always a vague smile on his mouth when Misha takes them up.  It’s not his usual cocky grin or sly twist of his lip.  He remains soft, liquid, loose, while Misha lets his hands roam along wrist, palm, heart line. 

He has a swordsman’s hands, with all of those calluses and scars.  They glow like mother-of-pearl over his knotted knuckles.  He’s lost a few nails even since Misha met him, and coaxing them back into growth has left ridges like a tree’s rings.  His palms always smell like sweat and leather, musty, salty, and perhaps not entirely pleasant to the nose – but he can lick that off.

“One of the prostitutes once told me,” he murmurs, and Misha looks up. “That there is a line for everything.  Wealth, luck, lifespan.  Which are you searching for?”

He’s looking for the words, mostly, is what Misha almost says.  There’s a bundle of phrases locked inside of himself, words for the Joining and his Harrowing and the days before.  But he just shakes his head, presses his lips against Zevran’s fingertips and tastes their salt.


	5. Chapter 5

Urthemiel was the god of beauty, and in death – true death, not this Tainted thing that took her, twisted her – there is something of that in her again.  The sores, the bruising, the patches of blisters and pustules that have wrenched free of her tattered scales: they aren’t so awful now that she is fallen, sprawled atop Fort Drakon where Riordan downed her.  Downed her, killed himself.  A worthy sacrifice, the stories would say later.  Standing in the shadows, vigilant, as every good Warden.

Misha stands over Urthemiel and wants to weep.  Maybe it’s just the smoke and poison in the air, the sweat getting into his eyes.  The Archdemon seems smaller where she lies, her sides shuddering and glistening under the horizon fires, and she watches him as he approaches.  And she is beautiful, beautiful as the destruction that rages below, beautiful as something terrible and unknowable can be.

He isn’t weeping as the blade is sinking into her butter-soft eye, he _isn’t_ , not for the sigh that twists itself out of her teeth, not for Riordan, Hespith, nor Duncan.  Her death is quiet, and the end is too, just as Morrigan promised.


End file.
